Chinese Migration to Europe

Prato, Italy, and Beyond

Graeme Johanson, Narelle McAuliffe, Massimo Bressan, L. Baldassar

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781137400239
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137400246
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

Through an analysis of Chinese migration to Europe, this volume examines the most pressing migration and integration issues facing many societies today, from the political and policy-based challenges of managing increasingly diverse communities, to individual lived experiences of identity and belonging. In addition to chapters on the UK, France and Italy, the book spotlights one of the most extraordinary examples of Chinese migration to Europe: that provided by the city of Prato, just 20km from Florence in Tuscany, Italy. Renowned for its historic textile industry, Prato is now home to one of the largest populations of Chinese residents in Europe, a phenomenon that is remarkable not only for its magnitude but also for the speed with which it has developed. This edited collection, which brings together twenty-seven separate contributors, deepens our understanding of the case of Prato within the context of Chinese migration to the new Europe.

1

Chinese Migration to the New Europe: The Case of Prato

Loretta Baldassar, Graeme Johanson, Narelle McAuliffe, and Massimo Bressan

Since they started to arrive in Prato [in the 1990s], [Chinese] had transformed the destiny of one of Italy’s oldest industrial towns and changed the lives of its indigenous population.

James Kynge, China shakes the world:
The rise of a hungry nation (2009, p. 74)

Introduction

Through an analysis of Chinese migration to Europe, this edited volume examines the most pressing migration and integration issues facing many societies across the world today. These issues include the political, policy, and leadership challenges of managing the increasing mobility of diverse peoples which confront all tiers of government (including at the supra- and transnational levels) as well as the more local and private concerns of communities, families, and individuals surrounding life goals, identity, and belonging. In addition to broader discussions in the chapters on the United Kingdom, France, and Italy, the book spotlights what is arguably one of the most extraordinary places in terms of Chinese migration in Europe right now: the city of Prato in Italy, just 20 km from Florence in the region of Tuscany. Prato is now home to one of the largest populations of Chinese residents (as a proportion of population) in Europe, a phenomenon that is remarkable not only for its magnitude, but also for the speed with which it has developed (Latham & Wu, 2013, p. 49).

In the introduction to the pioneering work on Chinese in Europe published in 1998, Pieke comments on the relative invisibility of Chinese migrants (p. 15). A quarter of a century later, they have become highly visible in certain places in Europe. Of the more than 100 migrant groups present in Prato today, Chinese are by far the group that is considered most ‘other’ (Raffaetà, Baldassar, & Harris, 2015). According to local government statistics based on registered residents, as at 31 December 2013, there were 16,182 China-born residents in the city of Prato, which represents 8.45 per cent of the total population of 191,424 (Ufficio Statistica, Comune di Prato, 2013). Including these Chinese, there were 34,225 foreign-born residents making up 17.88 per cent of the total population (Chinese represent 47.28 per cent of the foreign-born). Table 1.1 shows the numbers of documented immigrants from the top five sending countries (China, Albania, Romania, Pakistan, and Morocco) residing in Prato in 2013, but these figures are broadly understood as underestimates as migrants can easily fall in and out of ‘legal’ status because stay permits are contingent on employment, which for many is intermittent at best (Ambrosini, 2014; Riccio, 2014). Sambo (2013, p. 110) also draws on statistical data from the local government to show the dramatic rate of growth in the number of China-born registered residents in Prato: in 1990 there were just 500, in 2000 there were more than 4,000, and in 2010 there were almost 12,000. A recent European Union (EU) report refers to estimates which put the actual Chinese population in Prato at between 30,000 and 40,000 (Latham & Wu, 2013, p. 35), about twice the official figure.

Table 1.1 Foreign population of Prato by citizenship as at 31 December 2013 (top five countries only)

Citizenship	Number
Chinese	16,182
Albanian	4,926
Romanian	3,358
Pakistani	2,151
Moroccan	1,593
Others	6,015
Total	34,225
Source: Ufficio Statistica, Comune di Prato (2013).

The ‘invisibility’ of Chinese in Europe reported by Pieke (1998) was in no small measure linked to the political context of postwar Europe in which, again according to Pieke (p. 13), ‘Chinese immigrants suffered negligible racial discrimination, had ample business opportunities, faced only limited competition from other groups, and could rely on extensive government services open to all’. This is a starkly different scenario from that of the Europe of today. In just two decades of (albeit relatively significant) Chinese immigration, Prato has transformed into a, mostly uneasy, multicultural society with a growing community of locally born, second-generation migrants who are challenging the dominant discourses of Italian – and European – identity and culture. Importantly, it is Chinese and other immigrant groups which are contributing over half of the natural population growth (Bracci, 2013), as Bressan and Krause (2014, p. 67) explain:

In the public health sector of Prato (ASL) in 2011 some 3,270 babies were born, and babies born to non-Italian citizens represented 53% of the total. Since 2009 the births of Italian women were less than those of foreign women. This growth was in no small measure due to a shift in recorded births from women of Chinese nationality, whose births made up 15.5% of the total in 2006 to 36.1% in 2011.

Not surprisingly, claims to citizenship, particularly for the second generation, have become particularly fraught (Colombo, Domaneschi, & Marchetti, 2011). A number of commentators have highlighted that several EU member states, including Italy, have responded to the challenges presented by immigrant integration by introducing more restrictive immigration and citizenship measures. In this context, citizenship is used as a tool to limit immigration rather than as a tool to encourage integration (cf. Zincone, 2006). This has given rise to a ‘Fortress Europe’ approach to immigration policy and claims that multiculturalism has failed (Furedi, 2005). Indeed, the case of Prato represents a kind of litmus test for the possibilities and challenges of global mobility and immigrant incorporation in contemporary receiving societies. Using a mix of social science approaches, this book documents the social, economic, and political upheaval that often accompanies significant population movements, particularly when they occur over a relatively short space of time and during periods of economic crisis (Higley, Nieuwenhuysen, & Neerup, 2011).

The aim of this chapter is to provide a succinct overview of the various issues that are important to all of the chapters that comprise this volume. We begin with a summary of Chinese migration to Europe in general to provide the necessary context for the more detailed and focused case studies that follow. This historical discussion is further deepened in Part I of the book, which includes chapters on France, the UK, and Italy. We then examine contemporary Chinese emigration today, with a particular focus on the prefecture city of Wenzhou and its transnational links to Europe, Italy, and especially Prato. Wenzhou and its constituent districts and counties, located in China’s southeastern Zhejiang province, some 500 km south of Shanghai, are the sending areas of the majority of contemporary Chinese migrants in Europe today (Thunø, 1999; Latham & Wu, 2013, p. 17). Using the prefecture city of Prato as our lens, we also discuss contemporary Europe and its response to the massive influx of immigrants to its shores. This is also the focus of the chapters which comprise the remainder of the volume that, taken together, chart a diverse and complex set of issues. Part II examines processes of integration and inclusion, with in-depth ethnographic accounts of both the opportunities and challenges of the second generation and the potential for social mobility as well as the contested uses of urban space and the profound impact of the often inflammatory and ill-informed media reports. These themes are revisited in a transnational frame in Part III, with a particular focus on the impact of social media, cultural values, and religion as well as the underlying economic processes that govern and link the ‘here’ and ‘there’. The volume concludes with Part IV and a broader analysis of the complex mix of socio-economic and cultural factors evident in Chinese migration communities in Italy beyond Prato.

Historical context

Any discussion of Chinese migration to the new Europe requires an understanding of the history of Chinese migration to Europe more generally within the context of the broader Chinese diaspora. Benton and Gomez (2014, p. 1157) have written recently about the rise of Sinophobia and anti-minority sentiment more generally. They argue that Chinese communities are an appropriate focus for the analysis of these growing anti-migration rhetorics given their spread ‘across more countries of many different sorts and, initially, different colonial regimes’ as well as the social, ethnic, and generational diversity of these different waves, which ‘meet and interact more than in comparable communities’. Furthermore, contemporary global politics about the ‘rise of China’ make it a major social and economic issue for certain countries (including Italy), in which, as Benton and Gomez (2014, p. 1158) argue, it is seen as overwhelmingly negative:

In the developed world, particularly in Southern and Eastern Europe, and in the developing world, the perception that Chinese dominate key economic sectors causes discontent. Some in the majority community refuse to recognize the Chinese economic contribution, seeing them as ‘outsiders’ without a valid claim on national resources. This economic marginalizing chimes with and reinforces the refusal to accept immigrants’ and minority ethnics’ claim to national belonging.

As the chapters in this volume make clear, the above description certainly rings true for the experience of Chinese in Europe and in Prato in particular.

We have no space for an in-depth account of the history of the Chinese diaspora, and others have written extensively on the topic (Cohen, 1997; Wang, 2000; Ma & Cartier, 2003; Pan, 2006; Fitzgerald, 2007). By way of summary, a case could be made that there are two broad types of Chinese comprising the diaspora. The first is the larger group and is made up of long-settled migrants most of whom live in Asia, Australia, and North America, but with communities also in Europe (namely, Britain, France, Portugal, and the Netherlands). These are older migration waves with colonial and postcolonial histories (Sinn, 1998). These migrants usually hold the citizenship of the countries in which they reside, and, although disunited, diverse, and highly segmented by Chinese region of origin or by subsequent country of remigration, they identify to a greater or lesser extent as ‘overseas Chinese’ in a cultural sense (Ang, 2001). This categorisation is complicated by the arrival, over the past few decades, of new ‘mainland Chinese migrants’ into these same historical countries of destination (Liu, 2005). It is these new arrivals who comprise the second group and who are also settling in new destinations, including throughout Europe, South America, and Africa. These more recent migrants tend to feel a transnational solidarity with the nation-state of China and ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Chinese Migration to the New Europe: The Case of Prato
• Part I: Chinese in Europe: Historical and Contemporary Disjunctures and Continuities
• Part II: Chinese in Prato: Integration and Inclusion
• Part III: Chinese in Prato: Local, National and Transnational Networks
• Part IV: Chinese in Italy: Socio-Economic and Cultural Belonging
• Bibliography
• Index